Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Bush’s Report Card, Pt.4 – How can they call it ‘a forward economy’?

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Suppose we have 99 people earning $40 thousand a year and 1 person earning $100 million annually (some do). (All with health insurance, by the way.) The median (average) wage here is $1,039,600. Now say that 7 out of the first 99 all lose their jobs while the rest, including the millionaire remain employed. Those 7 get new jobs, but their new pay is only one quarter of what it was (now $10,000). They’re only being paid 25% of what their pay once was. But, because the millionaire didn’t lose his/her job, the median pay is still $1,037,500. Almost no change in the median ($2,100 drop, on average), even though 7% of the people are severely hurting. Each of those 7 has lost $30,000. If this was 7% of our nation’s work force of, say 100 million workers that experienced this, than around 7 million Americans could have been reduced to only one quarter of their former salary. Would we expect those 7 million to still have health insurance? Or would they simply join the growing number of Americans with no health insurance? That may be the the case here.

The census doesn’t elaborate, but it does imply that the filthy rich did not take the brunt of the layoffs and those who did, were hit hard. Other sources indicate that the average pay for the millions who had to find new jobs because of international out-sourcing, was reduced to around 25% of what those people had been earning before the layoffs. It’s interesting to note that 7.2 million Americans have, actually, lost their health insurance, according to the census. The deca-million group without health insurance keeps swelling and we wonder why?

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